Foreword

Bob Dylan's Dream

The June 1966 issue of the youth-oriented American fashion magazine Glamour carried an unusual feature: lyrics from the soon to be released Bob Dylan song Visions of Johanna, which Dylan had been performing onstage, alone, with an acoustic guitar, since late in the previous fall. "Seems like a freeze-out," he'd say to introduce the song before stepping into its slow, languid account of a night of bohemian gloom. Soon the song, recorded in Nashville earlier in the year with the best session players in town, would make a black hole on the first side of Dylan's double album Blonde on Blonde.

What was unusual about this was that the lyrics worked on the Glamour page as they were presented: bare, without accompaniment, without a singing voice, as poetry. All through Bob Dylan's writing life - beginning before his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, the songs leaping in ambition, sophistication, daring, and style at first year by year and then month by month if not week by week - Dylan had written words meant to come to life when they were played and sung. A clumsy line meant as no more than a way to get from one place to another. The limp "He really wasn't where it's at" between the unflinching "Ain't it hard when you discover that" and the swirling "After he took from you everything he could steal", in Like a Rolling Stone, could fly by all without harm when it was lifted by a melody that was itself shot out of the cannon of a song by the singer increasing the pressure. But on the page a song's words are naked.

Line by line, Blowin' in the Wind is pious, or falsely innocent - isn't it obvious that whoever wrote "Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail / Before she sleeps in the sand?" already knows the answer, assuming he, or anyone, can actually bring themselves to care about such a precious question? But Visions of Johanna is asking different sorts of questions. Such as: Where are you? Who are you? What are you doing here? So you want to leave? Think you can find the door?

If you read "We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it" in Glamour in 1966, without having ever heard the line in a song, you could feel stranded in the white spaces between the words. People wandering from one corner of a loft to another, doped, drunk, half-awake, fast asleep, no point to the next breath, let alone the next step. "Sitting on the floor," as musician Steve Strauss wrote of the song in 1967, "collecting highs like so many stockbrokers collecting shares before retirement." As slowly as the song was played in late 1965 (at the time, the story was that the song had been written during the great east coast blackout of November 9 1965) on the page it was slower, because as a reader you stopped at every word, trying make it give up as much as it promised.

As a set of five verses, Visions of Johanna makes a narrative solely out of atmosphere. That's one reason why it read so slowly in 1966, and why it can read so slowly today: why the song as words on a page can silence the song you might carry in your head, and make you say the song yourself. There is a drama taking place here, in this dank room - somehow too big, too much space for too many people, too many shadows, for the person who's telling the story to get his bearings - even if nothing is happening, or if whatever does happen, whatever events actually push the air aside and mark a moment in time the narrator can actually remember, are not really events at all. This is what happens here: "We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight." Someone says, "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him." A woman opens her fist to show the drugs she has and dares anyone to say no. "The country music station plays soft." And yet the peculiar contours of the fable that is being related immediately make sense. The words seem to meet each other in perfect balance, and separate with a sense of having said everything there is to say.

With poetry having left rhyme behind in the 19th century, rhyming couplets are now almost impossible for the modern eye to scan; here the gravity of the words, the dread in the synapses ("But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off"), erases all awareness that a line that ends with face is followed by one that ends in place. It's a locked-room mystery and you're in the room. As you read, you can't imagine wanting to get out, because you haven't yet explored every corner or plumbed the darkness for whoever might be lying in it. You haven't found the skeleton keys the guy on the other side of the room keeps muttering he's going to play on his harmonica.

As the room is locked, there is a way that for the reader no less than for the characters in the song - Louise, her lover, little boy lost, the "D" train whores - the walls are made of air. That may be why, over the last months of 1965 and the first months of 1966, Dylan was able to record the song in so many different ways. Always singing solo when he took the song to a crowd, in the studio he always took it to a band: to the Hawks, the bar band he was touring with, the group that, in 1968, would step out on their own as the Band. Here in New York in November the song is almost a honky tonk, with a bouncy rhythm; two months later it rises off the ground like a cloud; not long after in Nashville it's low-budget film noir, Detour without a road but with the same dead end; double back to New York as the new year breaks and it is a fury, threatening to shatter anyone who gets too close to the sound. Reading the song as it moves across a page, it's hard to hear any of that. The words make their own rhythms, and their rhythms enforce their own quiet.

The other songs collected here struggle to escape from the recordings the reader brings to them, and sometimes, for moments, they do, but there's no reason why they should; they weren't made to live a life outside of music. Who knows what life Visions of Johanna was meant to lead when it was written? The answer is to a different question: this is a song with countless lives, most of them as yet unlived.

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About this article

Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan's lyrics

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 11.13 EDT on Saturday 21 June 2008.
It was last modified at 09.15 EST on Tuesday 26 January 2010.
It was first published at 11.13 EDT on Wednesday 25 June 2008.